The Termination Era: The Postwar Assault on Native Sovereignty

Some twenty-five thousand Native men and women served in the American armed forces in the Second World War. Eight years after they came home, on August 1, 1953, Congress declared it the policy of the United States to end federal supervision of the tribes "at the earliest possible time" and make their members subject to the same laws as any other citizen. There was no ceremony. Most of the resolution was a list: the tribes of whole states, then the Menominee, the Klamath, the Flathead, the Turtle Mountain Chippewa.

Termination meant exactly what it said. A terminated nation lost federal recognition, its land left trust, and its members became, on paper, Indians no longer. The policy is traced here from the commissioner who had run the wartime camps for Japanese Americans, through the Menominee of Wisconsin and the Klamath of Oregon, forest nations terminated between 1954 and 1961, to the Utes, the Paiutes and the small tribes with even less room to fight. Alongside it ran the relocation program, which moved families off the reservations and into the cities, and Public Law 280, which handed criminal jurisdiction on many reservations to the states.

Then came the resistance: tribal councils and the National Congress of American Indians, the turn of the 1960s, the Menominee campaign that won restoration in 1973, and the standoff at Wounded Knee that same year.

Congress meant that list to be the end of the matter. For the nations named on it, it was the start of a twenty-year fight.